When #startYourShift asked us to write about how to make the web better I could not help but think about my own journey on the web.

In the Past

My experience started with a friend sharing his dial up connection and teaching me how to browse the web. Soon, I had access of my own and could explore and discover the web by myself. When I started coding I looked for examples and tutorials online. They were written by other people with greater knowledge than mine on the subject and their experiences helped build my own.

Thanks to many other people, I managed to get better at being a web developer and to me that is what makes the web great. It also answers the question raised by The Shift: we can make the web better by collaborating with each other.

What Collaboration Means

Sharing, teaching, guiding. That is how we learn. That is how projects are built and businesses are born. What is open source without collaboration? What would be of GitHub, CodePen, jsBin, etc, if not for the effort of hundreds of people sharing their knowledge? Think about conferences. Or meetups. It’s all linked.

Personally, this is one of the main reasons why I’ve built this blog a while ago. I wanted to share what I’ve done in the past and what I’m learning at the moment. It’s not meant to be anything else and I’m fine with it. You can never know who your audience is going to be. Any small collaboration you do now could be the entry point or the incentive someone else needs. So why not give it a try?

The Shift

This post is part of the #startYourShift initiative where everyone is invited to write about different topics each month. I’ve bumped into this on Twitter and thought it could be a good incentive to make me write some more.